As a major issue to be addressed when a robot is introduced into a production line, a prevention of a temporary halt (a state in which a facility stops or idles due to a temporary trouble) has conventionally been pointed out. The temporary halt constitutes an obstacle to a reduction of a teaching period during the startup/adjustment of a production line, and also constitutes an obstacle to an unattended continuous operation.
As general design steps for a product, a structural design of the product to be manufactured and a layout design of cells used for manufacturing the product by an unattended operation are first carried out. As a result, part connection information (part configuration tree diagram) representing an order relation of connecting parts constituting the product, product design data such as geometric shape data of the parts, facility layout data within cells, and production facility data such as specifications of robots are obtained. Then, programming, installation/adjustment, and teaching tasks for operating each of the facilities such as robots in the production system start.
As a conventional industrial robot system, a technology involving detecting an error occurrence and generating a recovery sequence in order to recover a production facility is proposed for a case in which an operation state can be represented as a binary state (such as ON/OFF) (see Patent Literatures 1 and 2, for example).
Similarly, in order to recover from a failure in a production line, there is proposed a technology in which a control sequence program is constructed in advance block by block, and detection of a failure and activation of a program for recovery are carried out for each block (see Patent Literature 3, for example).